


Many Waters

by glittercracker



Category: No. 6 - All Media Types
Genre: Bittersweet Ending, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, M/M, Myths & Legends Zine, Selkie AU, Sort Of, do not copy to another site, fairly graphic sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-03
Updated: 2020-02-03
Packaged: 2021-02-28 06:33:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,689
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22539415
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glittercracker/pseuds/glittercracker
Summary: Shion, an exiled fisherman on a lonely Scottish islet, happens upon a strange piece of flotsam one stormy night.
Relationships: Nezumi/Shion (No. 6)
Comments: 19
Kudos: 67
Collections: Myths and Legends of No. 6





	Many Waters

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sinewho](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=sinewho).



> This is an AU idea I had a long time ago, and it always seemed to fit No. 6. The latest zine, "Myths and legends of No. 6" provided the impetus to actually write it. This version is far longer and much more nsfw than the version that appears in the zine but, well, it's still more or less the same story. (It is, if you will, the director's cut.) If you hate reading nsfw then read the zine version - you can get a pdf for just $1.95 here: https://no6zine.tumblr.com/ If you like things spicier, well then, read this one!
> 
> I have so many people to thank for proofreads and suggestions, and I know I'll leave some out so if I do yell at me but - @akumeoi for listening to the original idea and running 2 zines, @yangmingsin for being down for nsfw and for calling my writing crunchy and delicious, @pigeonsimba for ripping literature to shreds with me and @sinewho for trying to make me be kind to my characters!

Under the building storm, the beach was oyster-colored, the sky like the remnants of a bonfire streaked down low-tide sand. The mountains and skerries were studies in monochrome, waves seething black around them, lashes of white foam wind-flung from their tips. The only spot of color to be seen was the crimson stain spreading out around the body on the beach.

Shion stared down at the man in horror. His slender limbs curled tight as seed-leaves into his chest. His long, indigo-black hair streaked over his delicate features. His creamy skin had a slight iridescence, like a pearl mussel shell, and it was criss-crossed with bleeding wounds.

Shion knew by the depth and placement of them that they’d been made by the tip of a flensing knife cutting through something thicker and tougher that had once overlaid that fine skin. He also knew what it had been—a seal’s pelt—because he knew this man, and that he was not in fact a man. He was a selkie, a faery, a seal-human shape-shifter. He had watched him on countless moonlit nights when the selkie had dragged himself clumsily out of the sea and shed the sealskin that had now been cut from him. He’d watched him sing and dance until the sun rose and he donned his skin, reverted to a sleek, silent form, slipping back into the dark water.

Shion wasn’t proud of the spying. He knew that he was trespassing on something not just secret, but sacred. Yet it had been as all the old ballads warned: he was entranced the first time the moon lit on the selkie’s smiting beauty, and that was before the creature began to sing. His voice was sweet and full of the dark heart of the sea, his song elegiac. With that, Shion was lost to a longing more powerful than anything he’d felt in his life before. 

The ballads told of that, too: men so smitten that they stole seal-women’s skins to bind them on land as their wives—which only made the present scene before Shion stranger. Who would forcibly take the faery’s skin but leave him behind? A selkie’s skin, as far as Shion knew, had no value to anyone but the selkie. It was his doorway to the sea, and his alone, no more exchangeable or transferable than a hand or a leg. Yet even the dim storm-light was enough to show that the beach was empty. The skin wasn’t there. 

_ Why?  _ Shion wanted to scream into the wind-driven rain. He would never have tried to tether the selkie to land any more than he would pin a butterfly to a board for the sake of owning its bright wings. It would destroy his wild beauty, everything that made Shion love him in the first place. But someone had, and now the selkie was dead. With a heart like doused kindling, Shion bent to lift him, to return his body to the sea—but as he scooped him up, he moved. He twisted away from Shion, retching, and then glared up at him with eyes both terrified and furious. 

“Where is my skin?” he demanded, his musical tenor laced with pain.

“I—I don’t know,” Shion stammered, the blaze of those eyes making his head swim. They were the color of rain, and they weren’t. They were the color of nothing he had ever seen, nor likely ever would. “I found you like this. I… think it was stolen.”

The faery didn’t look particularly surprised, which was in itself surprising. He only held up one slender arm, took in the wounds on it, and then met Shion’s eyes squarely. “What do you want for it?”

Shion shook his head. “I don’t have it and I wouldn’t keep it from you if I did.”

Dark clouds jostled for space in those eyes. “Then why were you trying to take me somewhere?”

_ Because I thought you were dead,  _ didn’t seem like a delicate enough response. “You’re hurt,” he said instead, “and this storm will be a hard one. I was taking you home with me. To help you.”

The selkie’s face cracked into a bitter smile at odds with his delicate features. “When has a human ever helped a selkie?”

“What?” 

“You make us slaves and kill us when you can’t.”

Shion’s anger flared, and he spoke before he thought: “I could have made a slave of you a hundred times over, but I didn’t! I  _ wouldn’t!” _

The selkie’s expression changed again, darkening until it threatened like the lowering sky. “You? That was  _ you  _ I felt watching?”

“I…”

“I’d rather die,” the selkie man said, voice like the stinging rain, “than set foot in your home.” Pain clear in his movements, he pulled himself to his hands and knees, and then simply swayed, blood streaming from a deep wound on his shoulder and trickling from the other, smaller ones. The next moment he collapsed, unconscious again.

“Sorry,” Shion sighed as he heaved the selkie into his arms, “but I can’t leave you to die.” Setting his face to the storm, he began the long walk back to his cottage.

*

That night, the selkie thrashed on the pallet by the fire pit like one in a fever. But he was cold—ominously cold. He wept and cried out in his own language, repeating what sounded like names, his voice plangent with grief. 

The selkie had mentioned mourning.  _ Who were they? _ Shion wondered.  _ What was done to them to make you hate me so much?  _

There was an old scar, the faded color of sea-pinks, broad and star-shaped on his back. Did his nightmares and antipathy for humans have something to do with this? Shion doubted the selkie would tell him even if he were in a position to be asked. 

He sat watching him turn and moan until he couldn’t stand his suffering any longer. Then he brewed a draught of poppy and forced it, spoonful by spoonful, between the faery’s clenched teeth. Once he’d relaxed, Shion gathered more blankets and wrapped them around the two of them. To Shion’s shock, rather than start away or cry out, the selkie turned toward him, burrowed into his warmth, and finally slept.

*

“Get off of me!”

The irate voice startled Shion from dreams of blood seeping into white sand, the sea reaching dark fingers to reclaim it. He sat up, blinking blearily at the selkie, who glared at him from a few feet distant with eyes like storm-rain and an expression of murderous hatred. Shion was speechless, stunned by his beauty and his fury and his shameless nakedness. He had clawed the bandages from his skin, re-opening the wounds, and blood trickled down his arms and chest. 

“W-what?” Shion finally stuttered.

“You _slept with_ me!” Shion flushed crimson, and the selkie snarled, “Are you an idiot as well as a thief?”

Shion’s anger flared. “I told you I have nothing to do with your missing skin, and I lay beside you because you were so cold I thought you’d die of it!”

“Without my skin, I might as well have,” the faery said through clenched teeth. He stood, started for the door.

“Stop! You can’t leave!” Shion flung himself into the selkie’s path.

The selkie gave him a livid smile. “Why not?”

“Because I don’t want you to die, and you will if you go out there.”

“I don’t care what you want,” the selkie answered, anger like a ripcurrent’s buried menace. 

“I know,” Shion said, his voice mild but steely, “what it’s like to lose everything. How despair clouds your reason. I also know that it doesn’t last forever. So, when you’re strong enough to move me out of your way and tell me why, you can go. Not until then.”

The selkie laughed and lunged for him, dragged him from the door. Shion was so shocked that he didn’t even try to stop him as he wrenched it open, stood for a moment of proud defiance in the rain and wind, black hair and bright blood streaking down his back; and then collapsed, unconscious, on the front stoop.

Sighing, Shion brought him back inside and began to re-bind his wounds.

*

It took five days for the storm to unravel itself, leaving a sullen grey stillness behind. Shion had kept the selkie sedated as he healed—remarkably fast, but then, he was fae. Now it was time to keep his promise. He let the last draught wear off, and watched for the selkie to waken by the pale light streaming through the open door. He had just begun to think that it was taking too long, to feel for a pulse, when the selkie’s eerie eyes flew open and Shion found himself pinned on his back, the knife he’d used to peel potatoes for breakfast hard against his throat.

“Am I strong enough now to walk out your door?” he asked with an ironic smile. “Is ‘I’ll kill you if you try to stop me’ a good enough answer to ‘why’?” 

“You don’t need the knife,” Shion said, the tip of the blade sending a chill through his body. And something else: something he hadn’t felt since he’d been exiled. Awake.  _ Alive. _ And with it, the curious sensation not of fear, or even resentment, but, instead, the desperate need for the selkie to keep holding him this tightly; to never let go.  _ Stay!  _ his heart cried. But he had made a promise. 

“I told you you’d be free to go when you healed.”

“Give me one good reason not to take my vengeance before I go,” the selkie spat. 

“Because he didn’t do anything,” someone said, “if it’s the Mao massacre you’re talking about. That happened in his grandfather’s time.” 

Both of them turned to the speaker: a slight figure dressed in a tattered, shapeless robe, their hair hanging around them like a cloak, several dogs by their bare feet. 

“Inukashi,” Shion said, uncertain whether he was glad to see them or not.

“Hello, Shion,” Inukashi said with a wry tilt to their head. “And Nezumi of the Mao.”

The selkie’s face darkened. “How do you know my name?”

“A good witch knows the names of the local fae. Besides, when I realized that this idiot was besotted with you, I thought I might need it to save him. Looks like I was right.”

There was a threat in the witch’s voice, but Shion said, “Inukashi, just let him go.”

“Go?” Inukashi leaned against the doorframe. “Where? Your skin is gone, sea-dog. You’re stuck here.”

The selkie let go of Shion and raised the knife to the witch. Inukashi flicked a wrist, their delicate fingers splaying in a forked sign, and the knife flew to the floor, skittering across the packed dirt to come to rest against the stones of the firepit. 

The selkie’s eyes widened for a moment, and then narrowed. “A true witch. Very well. But I am stronger than you, if it comes to a fight.”

“You don’t seem surprised to find him here,” Shion said, his eyes hard on Inukashi.

“Because I’m not. I could feel his magic when you brought him here, and I knew that he must be in trouble, because the last of the Mao would never willingly enter a human dwelling.” They turned piercing eyes on Shion. “I would have come earlier, but the causeway was flooded. I half- expected to find you dead.”

“He wouldn’t—” Shion began, but glares from grey eyes and brown silenced him.

“Where is my skin?” Nezumi demanded.

Inukashi sighed. “If I knew that, do you think I’d have showed up without it? I want you gone as much as you want to go. But I can’t feel it anywhere on this peninsula.”

With a growl, Nezumi shoved past them and off down the steep hill toward the sea. Shion began to follow, but Inukashi grabbed his arm. “Don’t bother,” they said. “He’ll be back, and he’ll be fine, such as it is. It’s  _ you  _ I’m worried about.”

“Me?” Shion asked.

“Yes, you idiot! Your new pet faery is a hundred times stronger than you, and he hates you! You can’t keep him here.”

“Then where is he meant to go?”

“To hell, for all I care. Fae are never anything but trouble.”

Ignoring the jab, Shion said, “Tell me about this massacre.”

Inukashi sighed, rolled their eyes. “You’re really going to do this.”

“Do what?”

“‘Do what,’” they repeated, scoffing. “Shion, you’ve been wandering around with your head in the clouds for months—I mean, more than usual—and there’s a cast of the fae about this little infatuation that’s like a hammer in my brain. It didn’t take long to figure it out.”

“Infatuation! I’m not—” He caught Inukashi’s look, and stopped, because his friend was right. The longing he felt for the selkie—Nezumi—was powerful as a spring tide, and deep in his heart he knew that it was just as dangerous. He also knew that he was long past being talked out of it. “Fine. Maybe I am. Just tell me what happened to him.”

The witch gave him a despairing glance, and then relented. “Once, selkies weren’t uncommon here. The moonlit dances, the stolen brides, all of that really happened in one way or another. And so no one hunted seals but once in a blue moon, because that seal might turn out to be a selkie. But then… ”

“There was a blue moon?” Shion supplied, watching the rising wind coax the grass and wildflowers to stand tall again. Coltsfoot, celandine, marsh marigolds and primroses: all the shades of the reluctant sun. If he ever married, Shion thought, these would be the flowers he would wear; and then he wondered why he’d thought it. He would never marry, at least not as long as he stayed here, and at any rate men were never so adorned.

“There was famine,” Inukashi said, recalling him to the present. “The potato crop failed, fishing was bad. The villagers knew they wouldn’t last the coming winter.” The witch sighed, scratching behind a yellow dog’s ears. “Times like that, Elyurias would forgive the village taking a seal or two, if they had their witch make the proper obeisances. If they did it with respect. But they attacked a colony all at once, so none would escape. Only, when they slit their skins they didn’t find seal meat, just dying selkies. And so they ran.”

“They left them to die like that?” Shion asked, feeling bile rise in his throat. It had been bad enough to see Nezumi flayed. But an entire colony? Women?  _ Children. _ And then he knew.

“Slowly,” Inukashi said grimly, “and in agony. But one survived.”

“Nezumi,” Shion said softly, smarting to think of the terrified child, left alone among the brutalized bodies of his clan. And then what? Learning, somehow, how to survive without them. Living for all those solitary years with no companion but grief. “Didn’t Elyurias do anything?”

“Hells, she did! She sent a storm that wiped every human off of this peninsula. For a long time they stayed off, too.” Inukashi shrugged. “But people are people. They came back eventually—but they didn’t hunt seals anymore.”

“Until six days ago,” Shion said.

“They weren’t hunting the selkie. They wanted the skin. There’re those who think they have magical powers.”

“Do they?”

“Not as far as I know.”

“Is there any way to find out who took it?”

“Maybe for a better witch than I am? All I can tell you is that the skin is nowhere on this peninsula. He’s stuck here, Shion, and he’ll take it out on you if you let him stay.”

“He has nowhere else to go.”

Inukashi sighed, and stood. “If he kills you, remember I warned you.”

*

Nezumi was calmer when he arrived back at Shion’s cottage, if not exactly contrite. But he accepted the clothes that Shion loaned him (a little too short in the legs and arms) and he sat outside staring, unfocused, at the water as Shion went about his chores. He milked the goats and fed the chickens (all, miraculously, had survived the storm) and worked in the garden. All the while Nezumi kept his silence.

When Shion went to the beach and came back with a sack of mussels, though, Nezumi stopped him from pouring them all into a steaming pot of water. “Not cooked!” he insisted.

Shoin handed him the bag, and he scooped a pile into his lap and began to eat them, crunching through their tough shells like hazelnuts and pulling out the meat with his teeth. Shion offered him more, cooked, along with potatoes and greens, but Nezumi refused them, instead eating handfuls of the dulse Shion had brought up to fertilize the garden. Shion watched him in bemusement, but when he asked if Nezumi wanted anything else, he only shook his head, and retreated to the pallet by the fire.

*

That night Nezumi woke screaming and shaking and bitterly cold. Shion knelt by him and asked, “What can I do?”

“Humans are warm. Stay with me.” 

Shion lifted the blankets and climbed under, settling beside Nezumi, who gradually stopped shuddering.

That was the last night that Nezumi slept alone.

*

Winter passed. A fickle spring warmed tentatively into a capricious summer. At first Nezumi remained aloof, speaking little, helping with chores only when Shion went out or wasn’t looking. Shion knew better than to thank him for it. 

Nezumi always came with him to the beach, though, catching fish with his bare hands while Shion picked seaweed and shellfish from the rocks. They ate outside when the weather was fine, watching the slow northern sunset. Generally they didn’t speak, though their silence was no longer so strained.

One evening like this, Nezumi tossed aside a stripped salmon carcass and asked, “What did you do?”

Shion glanced at him. “Do?”

Nezumi nodded. “No one ever comes here, and you never go to the village. Why?”

_ Why indeed _ . He sighed. “The problem is what I  _ didn’t _ do.”

“What didn’t you do?” 

He spoke in a rare tone of carefully-guarded interest—though truth be told, it wasn’t as rare as it had been. More and more often Shion heard it now, or caught Nezumi watching him intently, listening when he spoke. And so, while he wished that he had asked anything but this, if Nezumi was in a mood to want to understand him, he couldn’t let it pass.

Shion drew a breath, and said, “Fall in love.”

“That…isn’t something humans have control over, is it?”

“No,” he laughed ruefully, “and maybe that’s our greatest tragedy.”

“Tell me.”

Shion sighed. “I had a childhood friend named Safu. Her father is the laird of this peninsula. My father was a common fisherman who died at sea before I knew him, but that didn’t matter to Safu. As children we both caught a fever, and it left me with my white hair and this scar.” He traced the red patch on his cheek, down to where it disappeared beneath the collar of his shirt. “She wasn’t scarred by it. Still, after that, we were inseparable, having been in quarantine together so long. And then we grew up, and she wanted more.”

“Sex?” Nezumi asked. 

_ Sweet Elyurias!  _ “Well, yes, I guess,” Shion stammered. “But…Nezumi, do selkies marry?”

Nezumi shrugged. “We take mates, have children with them. But our lives are so much longer than yours, we do not often mate for life. We can love many times, and it is not necessarily bound to reproduction.”

The words surprised Shion. Love never figured in the selkie tales. Longing, lust, possession—but not love. “Well, humans usually  _ do  _ mate for life,” he said at last, “and Safu wanted that with me.”

“But you didn’t.”

Shion shrugged. “I didn’t love her the way that she loved me. And it was… ”

“Devastating.”

Shion couldn’t stop himself staring at Nezumi in wide-eyed surprise. The faery smiled wryly. “Did you think that we don’t feel these things as you do? That those seal women imprisoned by human men didn’t have lovers or mates already? You’ve seen me grieve; how could you see that, and still think that I am incapable of love?” He gave Shion a frank, if inscrutable look; Shion blushed. “I am,” Nezumi said simply. “Capable. Or I think I am.” A shade of bitterness crossed his face like wind-flattened grass. “I have not been given much opportunity.”

“Likewise,” Shion said.

Nezumi quirked an eyebrow. “Because Safu made you leave?”

Shion shook his head. “Her father did. He would have banished me completely, but Safu argued, and my mother…” In truth, he hated to guess what his mother might have done to compel the laird to the small mercy of exile to this little islet, attached to the mainland only at low tide. “So he let me stay, but I was to keep away, and to myself.”

“Before I came, you were all alone,” Nezumi said speculatively. 

Shion shrugged. “Not entirely. Inukashi visits me because no one can tell a witch what to do. My mother visits me because she’s my mother, and the laird is willing to turn a blind eye for her. But no one else would dare come near me now.” 

Nezumi’s pearl-shell eyes peeled through the layers of him. “Could you apologize? Marry the girl, and re-join your people?”

Shion smiled at him sadly. “Probably. But that would be a lie. It would be unfair to her.”

“But she would have what she wants, and you would have your people back. You could be contented.”

Shion twisted a stem of grass around his finger, thinking of what this statement meant to Nezumi. Not wanting to disparage it. Still: “She’s too smart for that. She would know, and that would make her unhappy; and besides, I don’t want contentment.”

“What  _ do  _ you want?”

Shoin pulled a bluebell from the grass.  _ You,  _ his heart answered. He said: “Those feelings that you talked about. The ones we can’t have.” 

He met Nezumi’s eyes. For once they were unguarded, and what Shion saw there wasn’t hatred or bitterness, but it also couldn’t be what he thought it was, it just couldn’t—not when his people had destroyed Nezumi’s. Not when Nezumi shone so much brighter than he ever could. He simply wasn’t worthy of what he thought he saw.

Yet Nezumi didn’t look away, and his eyes remained clear and bright and full of speculation. Invitation. Only half-aware of his own intention, Shion leaned forward and tucked the flower behind Nezumi’s ear, where it shone like a jewel against his blue-black hair. They gazed at each other in a moment of surmise, and then Nezumi’s lips were on his, cool and salty with a hint of sweetness, like wild strawberries that had grown close to the shore. 

A specter of protest crossed Shion’s mind: he was meant to protest. Or was he? His mother’s stories of faery rings and forbidden food and centuries passing in the space of a dance had not spoken to kisses. Even if they had, Shion didn’t have the will to resist this: a desire he’d held so long for this enigmatic man, loosed all at once and coursing through him like a storm tide.

He opened his mouth, brushed Nezumi’s tongue with his own as Nezumi pushed him down into the grass. He wasn’t rough, but he wasn’t gentle either, his intention clear as he twined his fingers with Shion’s and dragged them up above his head, dipping his tongue into the hollow of his throat, scraping his teeth delicately along Shion’s collarbone. The wind swept his dark hair around them, playing fast and loose, and it seemed that somewhere there was music, pipes and fiddle and harp, wild and not quite human. 

Shion sighed out five years worth of loneliness and longing and pressed against Nezumi, twined his fingers in his silky hair. Nezumi’s eyes blazed in his faery face, and a skerry-sharp smile quirked his lips as they hovered a breath-span from Shion’s.

“You aren’t afraid?” he asked.

“Why would I be?” Shion returned.

“I tried to kill you once.”

“No, you didn’t,” Shion said. For a moment Nezumi’s face clouded, but Shion laid his hands on either side of it, stroked from his high cheekbones to his fine lips. “Either way, I don’t think you want to kill me now.” 

In response, Nezumi took his thumb into his mouth and wedged a knee between his legs. Shion tipped his head back, moaned as Nezumi ground against him. It was overwhelming, and it wasn’t nearly enough. He needed to feel that pearly skin against his, and he had his wish almost as it formed, Nezumi casting aside the human clothes in which he never quite seemed comfortable.

Shion stopped fumbling with his own and simply gazed, helpless in the face of Nezumi’s beauty. He had a man’s body, but he was every inch a sea creature, his sinewy limbs long and sleek, his eyes the myriad greys of a rolling tide, his hair the inky blue of a mussel shell. Even his cock was elegant, long and beautiful in his arousal. He saw Shion looking and quirked another smile, running his hand along his own length, closing his eyes and tipping his face to the sky as he shivered with pleasure.

“Nezumi…” Shion said, his breath hitching.

He opened his eyes, languid. “Yes, Shion?” And he must have seen Shion’s unease, because his expression changed. “Do you not want this? Because I will not do to you what those human men do to seal women.”

Shion shook his head. “I want this. I want  _ you.  _ But… I don’t know how.”

Nezumi smiled again, and this time there was a sadness to it. “Do you think that I do?”

“I… you’re so beautiful, how could you not…?”

The faery shook his head ruefully, and began to unfasten Shion’s buttons. “I was a child when I lost my clan. Not old enough to have a mate. Not old enough even to have thought of it.”

“Aren’t there other selkies in the world?”

“No doubt there are,” Nezumi said, slipping Shion’s shirt off and letting the wind take it. He ran a thumb over one nipple, then the other, and Shion couldn’t swallow the moan that gave voice to his piercing desire. “But finding them would have meant leaving here, and…”

_ And you couldn’t. You couldn’t leave behind the place where you saw them last. _ Shion wondered whether there was anything he could give to the selkie that would replace even an ounce of what he had lost. “Take me,” he said. “Take all of me.”

Once again, Nezumi smiled. “I would never take all of you, even if I could; and while I would very much like to take what you’ll give, remember, I’m a faery, Shion. A wild thing. I can’t promise to do this like a human would. You can still say no.”

“I don’t want a human. And I will never say no to you.”

“Well then,” Nezumi said, smile arch and sweet and eyes dark, “I think this will work just fine.” He pushed Shion’s legs apart, bit one thigh and then the other hard enough to evoke a plaited cry of pain and pleasure, and then closed his hot mouth around Shion’s hard cock.

Blissfully, Shion let himself fall. 

*

Later, tucked into the box bed, limbs tangled together, Nezumi asked, “Does this mean we’re married?”

Shion had to laugh. “There isn’t a church in this country that would marry us, Nezumi!”

“That isn’t what I asked,” he said, his voice as close to warm as Shion had ever heard it. He ran slender fingers up Shion’s thigh, and then, the tip of one along the crease of his hip.

Shion whimpered, kissed the closest skin he could find: Nezumi’s shoulder. “We’re married if you want to be. We’re  _ anything  _ you want to be!” 

Nezumi found his lips, gently bit the lower one and then rolled between Shion’s thighs, kissing down his neck, his chest, his tight belly. There Shion caught him, cupped his face, raised it so they eyed each other. “But I don’t see how you can want to be. How you don’t hate me.”

Nezumi lifted a hand to Shion’s hair, stroked through the soft, white strands. “I don’t know that either. But I do know that I want to be.”

“Married?”

Nezumi smiled, so softly. Had he ever been soft before? “Yours,” he said.

Shion pulled him close. He’d only intended a kiss, but Nezumi was hard again against his belly. The selkie was, apparently, insatiable. Shion was delighted. 

*

Shion’s little plot prospered with Nezumi to help work it. Nezumi was also the only reason it didn’t fall to ruin. Shion would have been more than content never to leave their shared bed; to lie and gaze at his beloved all day, in between embraces. 

“Don’t be an idiot,” Nezumi said when he told him as much on their first, late-morning waking as lovers, kicking the covers aside.

“I can’t help it,” Shion answered, winding his arms around Nezumi’s slender waist. “I’m enchanted.”

Nezumi gave a sharp laugh and pulled away, stepping from the bed into the pool of sunlight spilling through the single window. Shion could have wept at the sight of him, naked and marked with his kisses and entirely unabashed. “You are in the throes of lust,” he said, pointing an admonishing finger at Shion, “that’s all.”

“But you’re a selkie.”

Nezumi rolled his eyes and began to stir the fire back to life. “Yes, and selkies are little more than an afterthought when it comes to the host of the fae. I have no power to enchant you.” 

“You do! I am.”

“You’re not,” Nezumi said rather severely, adding peats to the fire. “You’re just drunk on sex. Now get up and tend to your animals, or I’ll never let you have me again.”

Shion was outside before Nezumi could remind him that he was completely naked. 

*

It hardly mattered, Shion mused sometimes, whether Nezumi exerted magical power over him or not. He loved him, and that the love would have been true whether or not Nezumi was a faery; he knew it by the fact that Nezumi didn’t take advantage of his passion. The selkie always rose early and made breakfast for his lover that he would never eat himself, then twined their fingers to drag Shion to chores he would otherwise have daydreamed away. He made Shion help him gather food, and plant a garden that Nezumi would never partake of. Most of all, their hunger for each other was clearly mutual, and if madness that them at times, it was based in the sublime mundanity of the need to touch and be touched, to press themselves as close together as two corporeal bodies could. 

Shion loved Nezumi body and soul. He also knew better than to tell him so.

*

Sometimes Shion’s mother, Karan, came to see them, and she always managed to leave behind a few fresh bannocks, although she was forbidden to give Shion food. She only commented once on her son’s relationship with Nezumi, whispering as she embraced him before leaving, “I’m glad that you have each other.”

It was Karan who told them that Safu had left the village not long after Nezumi’s arrival. The village gossips said that it was to land herself a better husband than she’d ever find here. Shion hoped that it wasn’t—that she was traveling the world, as they’d once dreamed of doing together. 

He hoped for that for her, but for himself, he wished for no more than what he had. Bliss would be remaining with Nezumi forever in their tiny, perfect world.

He also knew how fragile their happiness was, and that one day, something would shatter it.

He just didn’t think that it would be so soon.

*

That day dawned still and crystalline with old snow and new frost. The little shapes cut into the screen of the box bed drew a lattice of light along Nezumi’s skin, and Shion was tracing it lazily as Nezumi kissed his neck when someone rapped on the door. They rose reluctantly, touching and kissing each other as they dressed, helpless with need. With knowing. Because somehow, even then, they both knew. 

At first, Shion didn’t recognize the woman who stood before them on the stoop. She wore a red woolen traveling cloak, and her hair was pinned up like a lady’s. Then he saw her eyes: warm brown, but no longer full of laughter. She was visibly holding back tears.

“Safu?” he asked. “Come in, it’s freezing!”

She shook her head. “I only came to give you this, and I don’t think that you will want me in your house when you see it.” She handed Nezumi the leather satchel she had been carrying, and then she turned, ignoring Shion’s calls, and retreated down the hill.

Shion looked at Nezumi. Their eyes met, Nezumi’s swarming with cloud. “Open it,” Shion said, choking on a sob.

Nezumi opened the bag, and Shion’s heart dropped as he pulled out the contents, let it unfold with a look part disbelief, part dismay. A length of fur, silvery-grey, cross-hatched by old scars. 

“Your skin,” Shion whispered. Nezumi nodded. “But why did Safu have it?”

“There’s a letter,” Nezumi said, offering it to Shion. “Read it?” he asked, because he had not yet reached Shion’s level of fluency, despite Shion’s teaching. 

Slowly, he unfolded the letter. “‘Dearest Shion,’” he read aloud. “‘This sealskin, I believe, belongs to a selkie named Nezumi, who lost it in an attack at the end of last winter. That was my fault, though I never meant it to happen. I paid two fishermen to watch him and take his skin when he shed it, and then deliver it to me. I always intended to return it. Instead, they stole it and sold it.

“‘When I learned what had happened, I vowed to find Nezumi’s skin and return it to him, or die trying. But of course, the only thing you really want to know is why? You’ll think I did it to hurt the person you so clearly loved, and therefore hurt you. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

““The truth is, I knew that I would never win your heart, because he already had it. I couldn’t bear to stay here, knowing that; but I also couldn’t leave you alone in exile. I knew what had happened to the selkie’s people. He was all alone, too. I thought that if he came to know you, he would love you as you loved him. But how would that ever come to be? And then I thought of a way.

“‘Imagine a bitter laugh, Shion. The bitterest. I meant only to give you a little happiness, and instead I gave you devastation. If I could take it all back, I would, but I can’t, and so I can only leave you both to make your choices. I will be sorry until I draw my last breath. I know that that will never be enough. Safu.’”

Shion felt his hand crumple around the page. He felt Nezumi catch him, guide him to a chair as his knees buckled. He felt hot tears filling his eyes and spilling down his cheeks, Nezumi’s cool hands wiping them away. He heard himself saying, “Go, go, you have to!”

“Yes,” Nezumi answered, and the tone of it was tremulous in a way that Shion had never heard it before. He realized then that Nezumi was weeping, too. “I do have to. I’m a sea faery; it’s in my blood. But Shion, so are you.”

“What good does that do me?” Shion cried. “I don’t know how to be without you! I don’t know how to bear it.”

“You’ll bear it by knowing that it isn’t forever,” Nezumi said, opening Shion’s palm and pressing something into it. Through his tears, Shion saw two rings carved from wood and polished to a soft sheen. Nezumi took Shion’s other hand and slipped one of the rings onto his fourth finger. “Hawthorne is a faery tree, and also a tree of love and union,” he said, tilting his silvery eyes upward.

Shion thought vaguely of young girls raiding the local hedgerows before their weddings, to weave the blossoms into their hair. He nodded, not meeting Nezumi’s eyes. 

“I made these from the branch of the Hawthorne tree by the door that came down in that storm last autumn. Both the same, because I think our hearts are also made from the same stuff… whatever hearts are made of. These are my promise that I will come back to you, when the sea in my soul is sated. As long as we both live, I will always come back to you.”

Shion nodded, still not looking at him, taking the ring that Nezumi still held and slipping it onto his long, white finger. “And I will always be here to welcome you. That’s mine.”

“Look at me, Shion,” he said softly.

At last, Shion turned his eyes upward. Tears streamed from Nezumi’s, glinting on his white cheeks. “You know that I’m telling you the truth, don’t you? This isn’t enchantment. It never was. I’ve meant every moment.”

“Faeries can’t lie,” Shion choked.

“No, we cannot.” A smile like a rent cloud, blindingly brilliant, quickly subsumed. “But nor can we help our nature.”

“And I cannot help my heart.” Nezumi stroked his cheek and then moved to pull away. Shion let out a cry, clutching at him. “No! Not yet! I need to be with you one more time. I need for us to…to… ” 

“Say it.”

The words wedged in Shion’s throat.

Nezumi sighed. “In all of this time, you’ve never asked me for what you want. Ask me now.”

“Make love with me,” Shion said softly. “Once more.”

Nezumi shut his eyes for a moment, and nodded. He was careful, fingers delicate as whispers as he removed Shion’s clothes; his eyes intent, as if he were committing him to memory. 

Shion, likewise, drank Nezumi in, from the long hair slipping its hasty knot to the silvery eyes to the faint flush of pink on his cheeks as he shed his own clothes more hastily, then bent to press a kiss over Shion’s heart. He tried to memorize the exact feel of Nezumi’s mouth—cool lips and hot tongue—and the graze of his teeth over shoulder and ribs and hipbone. He soaked in the touch of his elegant fingers, little more than a graze over his nipples, firmer on his sides as he knelt, and pulled Shion onto his thighs.

“Is this how you want it?” Nezumi asked, his eyes searching, earnest.

“Yes.”

“Say it.”

“I want you in me. I want you in me as deep as you’ll go.”

Nezumi’s breath stuttered.

Shion slicked them both with oil from a clay jar by the fire, and then, holding Nezumi’s eyes all the while, lowered himself down onto his cock until their thighs were flush. They made love slowly, silently, too aware of its inevitable end. Tears ran down Shion’s face as he came, and they clung together until they stopped shuddering, Shion’s wet face pressed into the crook of Nezumi’s neck. 

At last, though, Nezumi pushed back, wiped the tears from Shion’s eyes, kissed them from his cheeks. “Will you come to the beach with me?”

“No,” Shion said. “I’m sorry, Nezumi. I can’t watch you leave. But I’ll be with you every step of the way.”

Nezumi stood, and dressed, and then he picked up the satchel. He trailed his fingers down Shion’s cheek, and said something softly in his own tongue. Then he turned and walked out into the bright, cold morning.

“And I love you,” Shion answered him, in a low voice. “Elyurias keep you safe until we meet again.”


End file.
